When does human personhood begin?

Belief 5: At either 15 or 22 weeks gestation

Sponsored link.

Belief 5A: Personhood is attained at about 22 weeks gestation:

This argument is based on the definition of death.

Ethicist D.A. Jones has written:

"Death is not just another disease that can be specified, analyzed,
and catalogued as viral or bacterial, infectious or auto-immune. Death is
the final cessation of life. Thus defining death requires more than
medical and technical expertise: It requires also some agreed
understanding of what is constitutive of human life, and what it is that
must be absent before the person can be said to be dead."

"Sometimes it will be obvious to any reasonable observer that
someone is dead, or alternatively, that someone is still alive. Someone
who is breathing [without a respirator] and talking and walking around is obviously alive.
Someone whose body is rotting away and hanging off the bones is obviously
dead. However there are some cases, perhaps many cases, where it will not
be obvious to an unqualified layman whether someone is alive or dead. In
these cases it is the decision of competent physicians that decides the
issue." 1

Prior to about 1960, a person would be declared dead if both their heartbeat
and breathing had ceased and could not be re-started. But newer technological
developments made this definition invalid. Heart pacemakers can keep the heart
beating indefinitely long after all other internal systems have wound down.
Respirators can keep the person apparently breathing forever.

Death is generally defined in most U.S. states as a situation in which the
brain "flat-lines." That is, there is no major central nervous system
activity and there is no detectable electrical activity in the brain's
cerebral cortex. At this point, the person may be declared dead in many
jurisdictions. The patient may appear to be breathing, as a result of the action
of a respirator. Her/his heart may still be beating, either on its own or as a
result of a heart pacemaker. But he/she is judged to be dead. Unplugging the patient
from life support systems at this point will not actually kill the
patient; she/he is already considered to be dead.

The great rise of transplant medicine has, then, been wholly dependent upon
organ harvesting from so called 'beating-heart cadavers', that is,
patients who are determined to be dead on the basis of brain death criteria. 1
But their hearts continue to beat (sometimes with external help), to
keep the body's organs fresh for transplanting.

If the point of death is defined as a lack of electrical activity in the
brain's cerebral cortex one might use
the same criteria to define the start of human life. One might argue that
fetal life becomes human person when electrical activity commences in the cerebral
cortex. Human personhood, would then start when consciousness occurs for the first time,
and ends when consciousness irrevocably terminates with no possibility of resumption. One could then argue that a
fully-informed woman should have access to abortion at any point before the
point that human personhood begins.

According to author Richard Carrier:

"...the fetus does not become truly neurologically active
until the fifth month (an event we call 'quickening.' This activity might
only be a generative one, i.e. the spontaneous nerve pulses could merely be
autonomous or spontaneous reflexes aimed at stimulating and developing
muscle and organ tissue. Nevertheless, it is in this month that a complex
cerebral cortex, the one unique feature of human -- in contrast with animal
-- brains, begins to develop, and is typically complete, though still
growing, by the sixth month. What is actually going on mentally at that
point is unknown, but the hardware is in place for a human mind to exist in
at least a primitive state."

When medical ethicist Bonnie Steinbock was interviewed by
Newsweek and asked the question "So when does life begin?," she
answered:

"If we’re talking about life in the biological sense, eggs are
alive, sperm are alive. Cancer tumors are alive. For me, what matters is
this: When does it have the moral status of a human being? When does it have
some kind of awareness of its surroundings? When it can feel pain, for
example, because that’s one of the most brute kinds of awareness there could
be. And that happens, interestingly enough, just around the time of
viability. It certainly doesn’t happen with an embryo." 8

Under this argument, some primitive neurological activity in the cerebral
cortex begins during the fifth month, conceivably as early as the 22nd week of
pregnancy. If we allow a two week safety factor, then society might set the gestation
time limit at which abortions should not be freely available at 20 weeks.
Abortions could then be requested up to the start of the 20th week for normal
pregnancies, or at a later time if unusual conditions existed. Many state and
provincial medical associations in North America have actually adopted this
limit, probably after having used a different rationale.

Sponsored link:

Belief 5B: Personhood is attained at about 15 weeks gestation:

Almost all spontaneous abortions, (a.k.a. miscarriages), occur fairly early
during pregnancy -- typically before the 15th week of gestation. For reasons that
are not entirely clear, "nature" realizes that the embryo or fetus is
defective for genetic or other reasons. It is expelled from the woman's body and
pregnancy ceases. Author Ruth Colker argues that:

"One might argue that
the fetus is not potential life until nature has determined the true
potentiality of that life by deciding whether to abort the fetus spontaneously.
At a minimum, I would argue that a woman should have control over this period of
spontaneous abortion (usually lasting until week 13 or 15 of the pregnancy) by
deciding whether she wants to choose an elective abortion." 4

It is interesting to note that the Roman Catholic Church has had beliefs similar to this in the past:

Early in the 13th century, Pope Innocent III stated that the soul enters the body of
the fetus at the time of "quickening" - when the woman first feels movement of
the fetus. After ensoulment, abortion was equated with murder; before that time, it was a
less serious sin, because it terminated only potential human personhood, not actual human personhood.

Later in the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) agreed with this assessment.

That belief was reversed by Pope Sixtus V late in the 15th century who issued a Papal bull "Effraenatam" which
threatened those who carried out abortions at any stage of gestation with
excommunication and the death penalty.

However, Pope Gregory XIV revoked the Papal bull shortly
after taking office in 1591. He reinstated the "quickening" test, which he
determined
happened 116 days (about 16.6 weeks) into pregnancy.

Current Church teaching remains based on the ensoulment concept. However, since the Church is unaware of exactly when the soul enters the body of the embryo or fetus, it takes the most conservative position and assumes that ensoulment occurs during the process of conception. This could change at any time if the Pope were able to assess the will of God on this matter.